Published

HOORAH! SOME CRAP ABOUT SHADOWBANE! [Author: Hedron]

J. at Warcry has provided us with a lovely bait-the-staffer-and-watch-him-post article. His spotlight brought the post to my attention, and I think it’s a good summation of some of the interesting dynamics of Shadowbane. The heart of the matter is conquerable player-defined territory, and its effect on the psyche of the players as they choose whether to apply force, diplomacy, espionage or any other technique to try and increase their influence on the world.

The key aspect that Vosx brings out is the way in which the new paradigm frees the “good” personality type from the restrictions that were imposed by the good/evil models of other games. Just the very fact that “evil” tactics were punished by the game code meant that “good” players had lost the ability to employ ruthless means toward a higher purpose or in ambiguous situations or against anonymous targets. “Evils” could attack and profit from anyone, goods could only attack evils. In an environment with no geographic accountability this was an equation that looked something like this:

Good = Suck

That is until the devs cranked up the evil penalties so high that it made playing “evil” a truly annoying choice. In which case the equation became: